Are University Degrees Still Worth the Price?

For most of the 20th century, a degree was the closest thing to an economic guarantee. Universities controlled access to specialised knowledge, employers treated the parchment as shorthand for competence, and the wage premium justified the tuition bill.

However, in 2025, information is almost free, artificial intelligence can draft code and reports in seconds, and career paths mutate faster than curricula. The question is no longer whether higher education is valuable in principle, but whether any given degree today repays its cost in money, time and optionality.

The Arithmetic Has Tightened

A humanities or science student who enrols at the National University of Singapore last August will pay about S$8,250 a year in subsidised tuition, while a dental or medical student faces fees above S$32,000 each year. On graduation, the overall median gross monthly salary for fresh university graduates stood at S$4,500 in 2024, up 4% on the previous year (Source: The Straits Times). Fresh polytechnic graduates, by contrast, earned a median of S$2,900. (Source: The Straits Times)

At first glance the university premium looks comfortable. Yet a realistic pay‑back calculation must subtract two additional costs: the foregone income of four years outside the labour market and the uncertainty that almost one in five graduates will not secure full‑time permanent work immediately. Compound the interest on study loans and the margin narrows further, especially for degrees that do not confer a protected professional licence.

Skills Now Outshine Credentials

Employers increasingly reward specific, hard‑to‑automate knowledge that can be scaled with code, media or capital (i.e. software engineering, quantitative finance or biomedical design, etc). Traditional degrees remain the surest route into such fields, but they can hinder graduates who emerge with generalist skills that a large language model reproduces at near‑zero cost.

Conversely, degrees still dominate careers that rely on deep trust: medicine, law, accountancy and regulated engineering. In these domains a campus education is less about absorbing content and more about signalling ethical standards, peer‑reviewed rigour and acceptance into professional networks.

The AI Inflection Point

Large language models are already writing marketing copy, summarising case law and debugging simple code. As routine cognitive tasks commodify, labour market demand is shifting in two directions. First, towards meta‑learners who can re‑skill repeatedly over a forty‑year career. Second, towards deep specialists whose tacit knowledge is difficult to scrape from the internet.

Singapore’s own SkillsFuture movement recognises this tilt: its 2025 Skills Demand for the Future Economy report focuses on priority skills in the Green, Digital and Care economies, and offers interactive dashboards that track how those skills spread across job roles. (Source: SkillsFuture SG)

A Menu of Alternative Pathways

The erosion of the degree monopoly has spawned layered pathways that let learners pay only for the portion of education that clearly adds value.

• Stackable micro‑credentials from Coursera, edX or MySkillsFuture can be combined into part‑time degrees.

• Work‑study schemes allow polytechnic diploma‑holders to earn a salary while topping up qualifications.

• Intensive coding boot camps and industry apprenticeships compress skill acquisition into months rather than years.

Each path carries its own risk profile, but all share the advantage of lower debt and faster feedback from the labour market.

Making The Choice: Four Filters

1. Leverage

   Choose fields where one hour of skilled work can influence millions of dollars or people. Software, media and finance qualify; many face‑to‑face services do not.

   
   

2. Teachability

   If the core material is available free online, think twice before paying university prices unless the credential itself is legally required.

   
   

3. Downside risk 

   Keep total study debt below one year of expected starting salary. The cap protects against worst‑case earnings shocks.

   
   

4. Network value 

   Prefer cohorts whose ambition, diversity and complementary skills will compound opportunities long after the textbook is obsolete.

   
   
   
   

My Thoughts: A Conditional Verdict

A university degree in Singapore remains a strong investment when it delivers at least one of three benefits: a statutory licence, immersion in scarce leverageable knowledge, or accession to a network that multiplies opportunities over decades. When those conditions are absent, modular learning and early career entry would often deliver better returns.

The age of the one‑size‑fits‑all degree is ending. What replaces it is a lifelong design problem: curate the right learning, at the right cost, in the right sequence. Approach that decision with the same discipline an entrepreneur applies to capital allocation, and with the same foresight a historian brings to technological change. Degrees are no longer automatic passports, but they remain powerful tools in the hands of students who choose them deliberately.